In Other Words

IOW DICTIONARY IN THE CLASSROOM: USES & ACTIVITIES

How can IOW dictionary be used to develop critical language awareness, critical thinking, and critical digital literacy, and practice foreign languages (in particular EFL) in context and with a specific goal?   How can IOW dictionary be used as a tool for Second Language Acquisition, and to favour the students’ autonomous learning, engaging them in the research of words and their situated meanings?   IOW dictionary can be profitably used in the classroom for different purposes and with different modalities, helping teachers to develop their students’ critical thinking and critical language skills through participatory activities.

IOW dictionary…

• makes students reflect on how words can (re)produce stigma, discrimination, and oppression by challenging, deflating, and subverting predominant discourses on Othering
• engages students in critical thinking and promotes intercultural approaches
• enhances the students’ creativity, involving them in the research or in the production of creative materials that can challenge, deflate, or subvert discriminatory words
• fosters classroom interaction and critical language awareness through participatory activities, whether by discussing existing entries or collectively writing new ones
• encourages the students’ curiosity and reflexivity, inviting them to become detectives of words and their situated meanings, discovering how and why words are mobilised in specific contexts and times to suit specific ideological and political agendas
• helps students practice in-depth research, finding and comparing different sources, also promoting their critical digital literacy in order to approach critically AI ready-made products
• favours the co-construction of bottom-up alternative knowledges, making students aware of the hegemonic structures of knowledge production
• promotes the students’ egagement with languages, Critical Discourse Analysis, translation, plurilingual perspectives, and multimodal materials
• in the EFL class: motivates students to practice English in-context and with a specific goal; it helps students realise how the encounter with an-other language is the main promoter of the encounter with otherness – meeting the Other and meeting the Self as Other.

If you have any doubt or want to know more, please contact: paola dot giorgis at iowdictionary dot org

WEBINARS AND IN-PERSON WORKSHOPS

We organise webinars (for min. 5 participants; groups of teachers and/or students) and in-person workshops to introduce IOW dictionary.

If interested, please write your name, surname, and email contact to: paola dot giorgis at iowdictionary dot org

In the meanwhile, we invite you to navigate IOW website to get a clearer idea of how IOW is structured and what it offers, and to subscribe to the Newsletter (https://www.iowdictionary.org/subscribe) to receive all info about new and forthcoming entries, as well as about call for papers, publications, events, etc.

Take care & stay tuned!